How American Camouflage Conquered the World

Camouflage has been part of civilian fashion for decades—but about 15 years ago, traditional patterns like woodland and tiger stripe got eclipsed by a new digital pattern known as MultiCam. For Wired, Avery Trufelman—who hosts the excellent podcast Articles of Interest—tells the story of how MultiCam went from rejected prototype to style (and Special Forces) juggernaut.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”